Courses

GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

Program requirements for the Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies (CWGS) will change as of the 2014-2015 academic year.

WGS graduate courses are offered in the Fall/Winter session. Certain enrolment restrictions apply. First preference is given to students registered in graduate programs at the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

New Core Course(s) as of the 2014-2015 academic year:

WGS5000H Feminist Theories, Histories, Movements I

(Master’s students are required to take this course. Ph.D. students have the option of completing WGS5000H or WGS5001H)

This is an advanced course designed for doctoral students, which explores interdisciplinary feminist theories, methodologies and epistemologies, with particular attention to transnational feminism, anti- and post- colonialism, global capitalism, critical race theory, nation and state formation, gender and sexuality studies and affect theory.Enrolment is restricted. Please contact grad.womenstudies@utoronto.ca for details.

Core Courses offered from 2009-2010 to 2013-2014:

WGS1000H Theories, Histories, Feminisms(This course will be discontinued as of the 2014-2015 academic year)What is the context in which we now study histories and theories of feminism? This course will identify some themes and concepts important to feminisms of the past and evaluate them in light of new historical conditions. It will interrogate the status of feminism and examine its place and value in contemporary thought. What, for instance, can be said in the name of women? How do we understand sexual difference? And under what sign of sex? How do we understand feminism’s relationship to race and class beyond simplified analyses of intersectionality? Why the move to transnational feminism?

WGS1001H Feminism, Transnationalism and Postcolonialism
(This course will be discontinued as of the 2014-2015 academic year)Over the past fifteen years, feminist studies has been defined by a turn towards transnational and postcolonial perspectives. In this course, we will conduct a genealogy of this turn, reviewing some defining texts and reflecting on their impact. We will examine the political and theoretical milieu in which transnational and postcolonial approaches have gained currency. We will explore the kinds of questions that are facilitated, and also those that are eclipsed, by such approaches.

WGS1002H Feminist Methodologies and Epistemologies(This course will be discontinued as of the 2014-2015 academic year)How do we know what we know? What are the underlying epistemological and ideological assumptions we bring to this project of knowing? What are the terms upon which we can claim that project as a particularly transnational feminist one? And what are the set of ethically grounded practices that delineate it? Why are some forms of knowledge and ways of knowing privileged over others? Where do Mystery and uncertainty fit into this project? These are some of the questions that this course takes up for examination. We will seek to understand the processes of transnational feminist knowledge production by paying close attention to the problematics of place, space, time, genealogies, multiple histories, and cross-cutting identities and the various ways these are made to matter in this thing we call knowledge.

WGS Electives (not all courses are offered every year):

WGS1004H F History and BiopoliticsThis course explores the current and past politics of knowing and governing human and non-human forms of life. It seeks to challenge Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics” – defined as practices that imbue living-being with politics – through engagement with interdisciplinary scholarship that investigates how embodiments and environments are sites in which race, capitalism, colonialism, sexuality, property, dispossession, and technoscience are produced and entangled.

WGS1006Y Women and Gender Studies PracticumThis course provides students the opportunity to study, engage directly in, and reflect upon the multiple definitions of feminist social change work outside the university classroom. Students can choose from among many organizations in the Greater Toronto Area. Students will develop new understandings of the relationship between academic and activist work, thinking critically about the practice of experiential learning. Students will spend approximately 7-10 hours a week in their organization from September through February and will have scheduled progress meetings with an on-site mentor. They will gain exposure to the breadth of tactics organizations use, and will think about the politics of scale, coalition across groups/movements/borders, intersectionality and diversity, and neoliberalism. Students will learn how to conduct feminist social action research and program evaluation, and will gain practical skills in areas such as writing grant applications, press releases, outreach materials, organizational histories, and participating in community organizing. The final project is a written case study that contends with a central organizational problem or contradiction.

Instructor: TBA

WGS1007H F/S Independent Research and Reading in Women and Gender StudiesOffers students the opportunity to design a reading list, research project and/or writing assignments in their designated area of interest. Students are only permitted to conduct independent research if there is no course being offered in another department that relates to their project. Also, students must find a faculty member willing to supervise their project. Time, location and course requirements are decided in consultation with the course instructor.

Students are required to fill out a “Request for Reading and/or Research Course” form, subject to approval by the WGSI Graduate Coordinator.

WGS1009H S Digital Networks and Transnational ActivismIn the last few decades, online networking has offered women an important venue for reimagining activism and forging transnational feminist networks. The seminar will be a space for a collaborative examination of how activism is represented, experienced and performed among selected online communities of women around the world, including women in diasporic spaces.Not offered in 2014-2015.

WGS1010H S Black Feminist ThoughtVarious discourses, theoretical frameworks and ideological proclamations have been employed to analyze, criticize and interrogate everyday lived experiences of black peoples. This course examines the multiple oppressions and social representations of black women using a black feminist theoretical framework. Part of the course will be devoted to black feminist theory — a theory developed out of black women’s experiences and rooted in their communities. The course will also examine the following issues among others: strands of feminisms with particular emphasis on feminisms as advocated by the visible minorities; the divergences and similarities of black feminisms; and the heterogeneous nature of black women’s experiences. The course will be sociological and historical in nature and will examine the intersections of race, class, gender and homophobia.

Instructor: TBA

WGS1020H F Gender and Globalization: Transnational Perspectives
This course critically examines current interdisciplinary scholarship on globalization and its intersections with gender, power structures, and feminized economies. Related socio-spatial reconfigurations, ‘glocal’ convergences, and tensions are explored, with emphasis on feminist counter-narratives and theorizing of globalization, theoretical debates on the meanings and impacts of globalization, and possibilities of resistance, agency and change.Not offered in 2014-2015

WGS1022H S Histories of Gender and Sexuality in the U.S., 1945-PresentThis course pursues two themes. The first explores recent histories and theories of sex, gender and sexuality in the United States after WWII. We will read theoretical work that helps us understand these three key analytic categories, as well as their historical formation in relationship to a number of topics including racial formation; transnational capital; social movements, reproduction; LGBTQ histories; changing sex; pornography; post-industrial economics, and others. The second theme we will pursue concerns pedagogy. How might we teach these topics to undergraduate students during a period of ongoing crisis in higher education? This course will be in dialogue with the interdisciplinary conversation underway concerning attention, hearing and digital history via HASTAC and other sites. Students will have options concerning their assignments in order to engage with both course thematics. Students are invited to contact Prof. Brown to ask about a draft syllabus in the week before classes start (as this is a new course, the syllabus will not be ready until then). She can be reached at elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca.

Instructor: Professor Elspeth Brown

WGS1023H F Studies in Aesthetic Imagination, Creativity and Radical HopeThis course treats aesthetic imagination and and creativity as the processes by which we give value to human experience and make knowledge. Students will study the relationship between aesthetic expression and radical hope/futures. Readings will be drawn from the fields of cultural theory, affect studies, and psychoanalysis. Students will also examine and reflect on expressive texts.

WGS1024H F Women and Revolution in the Middle EastThis course examines the complex and conflictual relations between women and revolutionary struggles and focuses on a number of theoretical and empirical issues relevant to the Middle East and North Africa context.

WGS1026H F Race, Space and Citizenship
How do we come to know who we are and how is this knowledge raced, as well as “embodied, engendered and embedded in a material context of place and space” (Duncan, 1996)? Drawing on recent scholarship in critical race theory, critical geography, history and cultural studies, the course examines how we learn who we are and how these pedagogies of citizenship (who is to count and who is not) operate in concrete spaces, bodies, nations, cities, institutions. This course is intended for graduate students who wish to consider how their own research might draw upon the concepts associated with the production of racial and gendered subjects in space and time. It is organized as an intensive ten-week seminar (with readings equivalent to thirteen weeks or approximately 100 pages per week) and a mandatory day-long conference during which students present their work.

WGS1027H F Reproductive Health Law in Transnational Perspective
This course addresses significant developments in the legal regulation of reproduction in transnational perspective. The course builds primarily on this century’s legal developments including judicial decisions, constitutional amendments, regulatory reforms and informal laws to ask why and how abortion law is changing. It explores possible responses by analyzing developments in abortion law through four themes: constitutional values and regulatory regimes, procedural justice and liberal access, framing and claiming rights, and narratives and social meaning. The course will illustrate various dimensions of the transnational enterprise including the transnational influence of religious teachings, social movements and technological innovations on the evolution of reproductive health law.

This credit/non-credit course (which does not count toward the program requirement FCEs) functions as the WGSI colloquium. Normally, students will enroll in the first year of their Ph.D. program. After completion of this course, we recommend students regularly attend this seminar as a crucial part of their graduate education.

All Ph.D. students and collaborative Ph.D. students are invited to present their dissertation research in the seminar at least once before graduating. Please contact the Graduate Coordinator to arrange your presentation.

The WGS Research Seminar is a student-focused monthly forum, for the presentation of work-in-progress engaged in interdisciplinary feminist studies and its many intersections. Like a departmental colloquium, the seminar’s goal is to foster friendly, yet critically engaged, conversation and to feature the excellent emerging scholarship by graduate students and faculty. The research seminar’s overarching goal is to create opportunities for regular participation in the intellectual life of interdisciplinary feminist studies research here on campus. The WGS Research Seminar is scheduled monthly on a Wednesday, from 3:00–5:00 p.m.